David Hume and Adam Smith: A Japanese Perspective
本书汇集日本学者坂本达哉对休谟、斯密及苏格兰启蒙运动的研究，探讨斯密思想如何影响日本明治时期以来的知识分子，并分析翻译中的道德困境。
This excellent book brings together the major contributions to the study of David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment by Tatsuya Sakamoto, a leading Japanese scholar of the history of social and economic thought. Sakamoto has studied the connections between the intellectual history of the East and the West, and, in the final section of this book, he explores how Smith's ideas have influenced Japanese intellectuals since the early Meiji period.Many historians of economic thought have stressed the importance of the study of different economic contexts, as they “express the common intellectual heritage of a society and describe the economic image of the social group as a whole” (Lluch 2000: 462). According to Colander and Coats (1989), the circulation of ideas can be described as an “infectious disease”: the propagandist's function weakens individuals and groups, and thus it increases their possibility of being infected by new theories.We must not forget that the Scottish Enlightenment itself was at first national economics. In the eighteenth century, the field of moral philosophy was one of the favorites of the Scottish philosophers, and it is also the one that Sakamoto stresses the most in his book. Sakamoto also emphasizes the connection between Hume's philosophy and economics, the same as recent books by Schabas and Wennerlind (2020) and Trincado (2019). Sakamoto shows that Hume's economics was clearly distinct from the two other Scottish lines of thought close to Hume's theory: Steuart (contemporary mercantilist literature) and Smith (academic jurisprudence). Hume tried to bridge the gap between the practical empiricism of the mercantilist literature of the former and the normative rationalism of natural jurisprudence of the latter, developing the science of economics on the philosophical foundation of an empiricist theory of causality as well as inspired by the spirit of serving the public good of civilized society. But, paradoxically, according to the Japanese Smith scholar Yoshihiko Uchida (1913–89), it was Hume's theory of justice that provided a “Whig totalitarianism” with its most sophisticated justification of the fundamental principle of justice, based on the concept of public utility. According to Uchida, Smith became the father of economics precisely because of the profoundly antiliberal and quasi-feudal nature of eighteenth-century Britain, where the administration implemented a Whig totalitarianism. Uchida recalls the sentence by Smith that most mercantilist laws “may be said to be all written in blood” (Smith 1981: bk. 4, chap. 8, p. 648). For sure, Smith was presenting an alternative system to Hume. According to Hume, fanaticism encourages an inordinate love for freedom, and superstition a predisposition to slavery. For Hume, both of these—freedom and slavery—are real dangers to society, as they are an excessive conviction with respect to undemonstrated and unprovable principles. Then, he recommends not freedom but political moderation and the establishment of governments of laws, not of men. Hume endeavored to serve as the propagandist—a virus popularizer—acting as a self-appointed “Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation” (Hume 1987: 535), bringing the fruits of philosophy, literature, and history to a wider audience.In the book, Sakamoto also writes extensively about Yukichi Fukuzawa, influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment and champion of Japan's civilization in the form of Westernization from a historical perspective. Fukuzawa presents a theory of morality and civilization very close to that of Smith, embodying the economic approach of free competition and individualism. Here he makes an interesting point about translation and confusions in the circulation of ideas due to the constraints of language that, however, are caused by a real moral dilemma, “Das Adam Smith problem.” Sakamoto narrates an event at which Fukuzawa was talking to a certain high official in the treasury bureau. He noticed that there was no translation for the word competition in Japanese, so he invented a word, kyoso, literally, race-fight. The official considered that this was a very unpleasant word, as it was not conducive to peace, and so he could not transcribe the conversation with that word to the chancellor. The word kyoso was extensively used and understood in Japan and China as a ruthless and harsh society. The point is that Fukuzawa was a member of the lower Samurai caste, and of the central virtues of the Samurai, only two were self-regarding (rectitude or justice and courage); the other five were other-regarding (benevolence, politeness, veracity, honor, and loyalty), and all seven were part of the feudal system. In Adam Smith's theory of morals, Sakamoto alleges, all virtues could be understood in a self-regarding way (prudence, justice, beneficence, and self-command). But in Japan, the country's traditional ethics as a whole had been saturated with an individualistic collectivism or alter egoism, something still present in the popular truism that “the nail that sticks out gets hammered in,” which, however, for Fukuzawa is the basis for oppression and the tyranny of the majority.Although Smith influenced Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, a Japanese translation of The Wealth of Nations was not published until 1884–85, and Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments was entirely unknown until the 1920s. Apart from Yoshihiko Uchida, Noboru Kobayashi and Hiroshi Mizuta are also leading postwar Smith scholars in Japan. But in the history of Japanese translations of Smith's word sympathy, there is an interpretation division over the egoistic or altruistic nature of sympathy. At first, it was translated as dojo or kyokan, but Mizuta translates sympathy as dokan, emphasizing the sense of agreement with both pleasure and pain. He wanted to focus not on the emotional but on the self-distancing nature of sympathy, moving away from the feudal nature of the prewar Japanese mentality. This translation has dominated ever since; however, recent translators have come back to the word kyokan to emphasize the altruistic character of sympathetic sentiment. Especially after the burst of the dot-com economy in the early 1990s, Sakamoto argues, the neoliberal economic policies created a social and economic divide between rich and poor. Mizuta's one-sided emphasis on the individualistic aspect of Smith's idea of sympathy, which was once received positively, now faces a danger of being misunderstood as a symbol of egoistic individualism. Japanese people are turning in a nationalist and protectionist direction with a rise in political tensions, and thus the nonegoistic meaning of the translation of the word was felt convenient. Once more, Das Adam Smith problem is showing up.Here, other national cases are comparable. For instance, Spanish translations of The Wealth of Nations date back to the late eighteenth century (Perdices 2000), but the translation of The Theory of Moral Sentiments has suffered from similar drawbacks as in Japan, being fully translated into Spanish for the first time in 1997. As the translator, Rodríguez Braun, points out in the preface, this asymmetry reflects the mistaken perception among Spaniards that Smith was an extreme liberal championing ruthless capitalism (Smith 1997: 7). As in Japan, this interpretation has been the cause and consequence of errors in the translation of Smith's Wealth of Nations into Spanish, with Gabriel Franco translating self-love as egoísmo (selfishness) instead of amor propio in 1958 (Smith 1992: 17), which is the correct translation. Actually, The Theory of Moral Sentiments was translated into Spanish in a decade when liberal policies were being introduced, and there may also be something of a moral justification for the liberal economic system added to the translation (see Trincado 2014). Latin American countries have seen a similar evolution, with the acceptance of liberalism being even more recent.